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"It's still somewhat astonishing to me that Yahoo! is doing a better job of taking advantage of Vista-specific features in its IM client than is Microsoft."

one thing I noticed is that this version does NOT have nearly as many transparency effects as the earlier versions.  it doesn't look as Aero-like as it used to.

Waethorn - thats true. it is still pretty WPF-tastic though, and makes Windows Live Messenger look embarassingly ancient.

"it is still pretty WPF-tastic though"

i don't see a huge difference myself.  WL Messenger still has the Vista-esque UI gradient bars and such, just as Yahoo Messenger does.  i still find WL Messenger much more functional than Yahoo's too, so it's not enough to make me want to switch, especially considering that most of my contacts already use WL Messenger, so switching to Yahoo and losing some of the communication abilities (Remote Assistance, games, music-sharing, and voice chat which for some reason doesn't work, even though it's supposed to be cross-platform), the reasons for switching are non-existant.

I'm a huge YM fan... I really don't see much about WL Messenger that is better.  I never thought I'd be one of those "emoticon people," but it really does have an effect on chatting... and YM's are simply far and away better than WL Messenger (yeah, I know you can buy new ones or create your own... that's not particularly convenient).  YM's smileys focus on moods and expression--the type of thing you care about when casual English doesn't do a great job of conveying such.  The WLM ones that DO express emotion just don't do as good a job (some are pretty ambiguous), and then they have a ton of non-expressive ones such as a sun, a cat, a dog, a star... they seem just useless to me.  When I switch between the two for IM, I get frustrated with WLM.

And yes... it's very sad that YM is making a WPF version of their app and Microsoft is hardly doing *anything* with WPF.  Do they not have confidence in their own stuff?  What happened to "dog fooding?"  I'm a Microsoft fan, but I'm very, very disappointed after all the demo WPF apps that they are doing so little with it, even more than a year after Vista's release.  Perhaps they're waiting for the perf improvements coming this summer?  I kind of doubt we'll see a flood of WPF stuff from them anytime soon, though... seems like the focus has been moved to Silverlight instead.

Ok... just downloaded it.  Wow.  Much, MUCH faster than the first beta.  The animations are gorgeous.  Maybe it's just me, but the Aero translucent window border looks slightly out of place--though not nearly as much as I thought.  One other niggling detail--and I've noticed this in some other applications as well--there seems to be a delay in the font smoothing.  For instance, when you right-click on a contact, the context menu pops up, but the text is slightly blurry for a bit... then it becomes crisp.  

It's *almost* a replacement for the "regular" YM client now... the gotcha for me is that is seems to lack message archiving ability (which has always sucked somewhat with YM--there's no search interface... c'mon, Yahoo!).  

No GTAIV on your played list Paul?  What gives??

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sayguh: Check again. :)

I have always loved Yahoo Messenger. However, I'll hold back for the RTW version of this messenger as I've had a bad history with Yahoo Messenger betas. I do agree that MS has its work cut out with WLM and I don't use it anywhere near as much as Yahoo. As for me, just waiting for that paycheck so I can get my GTA IV on.